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North Vancouver health care leader retires after 42 years

Outgoing Providence Health Care president and CEO Dianne Doyle reflects on decades in the industry

Dianne Doyle started her career as a nurse at St. Paul’s Hospital in 1976 and now, more than four decades later, she’s ending it as the head of the organization, having set the stage for the planned new St. Paul’s that will serve the health needs of British Columbians for generations to come.

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Asked about her career highlights, she immediately referenced St. Paul’s Hospital’s impact during the HIV-AIDS crisis during the 1980s.

“When other organizations weren’t responding to the needs it was St. Paul’s who literally opened our own doors to HIV-positive individuals at a time when no one knew what this disease was, how it was being transmitted. All we saw were a lot of young people, mostly men at the time, dying of this horrible disease,” she said, adding that the roots of the epidemic helped create the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, a Providence-backed research institution that also disseminates health information and offers treatment programs.

Specifically during Doyle’s tenure as CEO, she noted Providence’s successful challenge of the federal government’s 2013 decision to restrict diacetylmorphine (heroin) under the Food and Drug Act – making it unavailable for medical treatment – as an important moment.

“We knew that there was strong evidence to suggest that the best and only treatment for the most heroin-addicted individuals, who hadn’t responded to other treatments, that the treatment option was medically prescribed heroin,” Doyle explained. “The federal government was not allowing that to happen, so a constitutional challenge then allowed us to make that treatment option available and from that now at our Crosstown Clinic in the Downtown Eastside we do provide service to heroin-addicted populations and have great success.”